11 ms·

Exactly why Java succeed - the world is dominated by mediocrity while idiots are mostly on management positions. This is why all we got nowadays are Windows PCs

Exactly why Java succeed - the world is dominated by mediocrity while idiots are mostly on management positions. This is why all we got nowadays are Windows PCs with Java. It "worth us" or "suits us well". Designers were too smart (consider David Moon) while management was "as usual".

yuhong 13y ago
What is also funny is that there was also the JavaStation which was once going to use special Java CPUs.
- dschiptsov 13y ago
  Do google for "Jazelle".)
  - lmm 13y ago
    I'd very much like to see a similar retrospective on why Jazelle failed.
    - anandroiddev 13y ago
      Are you asking about the proprietary ARM instruction set extension for speeding up interpreting Java bytecodes? It failed because JITs were faster, so as soon as devices had enough RAM/Flash/CPU to JIT they stopped using Jazelle.
brazzy 13y ago
No - the world is dominated by stuff that works and solves real problems. It doesn't care for how much smarter than all those mediocre idiots you think you are. It offers lots of opportunities for very smart people who mistake their mental masturbation for unstoppable genius to be very, very stupid.
- dschiptsov 13y ago
  Symbolics stuff not just worked, it worked remarkably well on the very modest hardware and solved real word problems. For an example of unimaginable by "modern standards" quality, go ahead and take a look at the Common Lisp documentation produced by Symbolics (the art of writing, "motorcycle maintenance" kind of clarity and conscience) which is buried somewhere inside bitsavers and take a look at the sources of Open Genera 2.0, the whole OS, which was available of dynamic modification and extension by the programmer, which could be found in a torrent search, and then go to the rosettacode website and look at every single page too see what a fucking crap is the language you are using to get shit done in exchange for a paycheck. It is worst in any possible way - verbosity, clumsiness, clutter, cryptic syntax, you name it. This is actually not interesting notion. Everyone with a bit of brains could visit rosettacode. The interesting questions are why it is so that the world is dominated by Java. Pages and pages were written about what's wrong with Java and why it is so popular. One sentence summary could go like this "a sandbox for crowds of packers to get shit done, agressively marketed to them via "you don't have to understand" memes by corporations to make big money". It spread like a virus due to bandwagon and peer effects and catchy memes like "write once" or "millions of man hours". Ok, use it, enjoy yourself, but, please, do not touch so rare and really wonderful things which you unable to comprehend.
  - brazzy 13y ago
    Yeah, I guess you'll keep telling yourself that because it makes you happy and remain unable to comprehend just how wrong you are...
    - dschiptsov 13y ago
      Why, yes, reading Symbolics CL docs or David Moon's "language for oldtimers" makes me happy, like any other decent reading.
    - ithkuil 13y ago
      Neither you nor OP are wrong. It's possible, and common, to have practical tools that suck hard. It's also true that the more people use a tool (and for longer time), the more ways it will be found to suck (and Lisp has been around for quite a while (and used by quite a few people too (probably used by less people than Java) and (indeed) it managed to spawn quite a few heated reactions (to it's salient characteristics)))
nnq 13y ago
The world is dominated by: 1. mediocre people 2. smart people with very little knowledge of their own limits and a very strong tendency towards intellectual masturbation and asocial behavior ...this is why languages that offer a few obvious way to to do each thing and are boring enough to make people concentrate on "getting their jobs done" instead of doing limitless intellectual exploration win. (For example, this is why a enjoy coding in Python so much: the language is so limited and boring that it actually forces me to concentrate on the interesting aspects of the problem itself instead of the interesting aspects of the details of solving it :) ) (...now, why didn't Lisp win at least in the academic environment, where it was obviously one of the right tools for limitless exploration (together with the ML languages) is beyond me. Things like Mathematica and Matlab should have been Lisp based (and then Lisp itself evolved to suit their needs, maybe even a few syntaxes added on top), open-source and massively publicly funded from the get go. But putting public academic money in the right places is even harder than convincing CS academics that tools, infrastructure, platforms and languages are not boring and unworthy of attention but crucial, and that the wrong choices made by academics on these topics doomed us all. And no, just refusing to make a choice and choosing "what works best in the industry" (the "we'll teach our OOP introductory course using C++ because this is what they use in the industry nowadays" thinking) is not a solution. You must make a choice for yourself and only for yourself and make it right! And CS researchers should realize that languages and tools are not just "technical details", they are the vehicles for their ideas and "the vessel shapes the content", so just choosing the strongest vessel (language/platform) to implement your idea disregarding how much it deforms it (like a researcher choosing C# instead of a Lisp language to first implement a new programming idea) in not ok!)
arethuza 13y ago
I think that's a bit harsh - I actually moved from mostly doing Common Lisp development (on DEC Alpha workstations) to Java development in early '95 and I really liked Java back then - I was as passionate about it as people are today about Go/CoffeeScript/Haskell. Java, at least at the start, really was something fresh and good. Sure it became a horrible bloated mess - but isn't that the doom that faces all succesful software eventually?
- zeckalpha 13y ago
  That's why "Haskell avoids success at all costs".
  - bayesianhorse 13y ago
    And it seems to be very good at this!
    - eru 13y ago
      Not good enough. I use it at a bank.
- pjmlp 13y ago
  Same here, I remember how fresh it felt by bringing GC to the masses and providing a more consistent experience across platforms than C or C++ were capable of, with their compiler specific behaviours, extensions and catching up with the ongoing standardization efforts.
  - SixSigma 13y ago
    Sorry but it was Visual Basic that brought GC to the masses.
nabla9 13y ago
"We were not out to win over the Lisp programmers; we were after the C++ programmers. We managed to drag a lot of them about halfway to Lisp." - Guy Steele, Java spec co-author

yuhong 13y ago

What is also funny is that there was also the JavaStation which was once going to use special Java CPUs.

dschiptsov 13y ago
Do google for "Jazelle".)
- lmm 13y ago
  I'd very much like to see a similar retrospective on why Jazelle failed.
  - anandroiddev 13y ago
    Are you asking about the proprietary ARM instruction set extension for speeding up interpreting Java bytecodes? It failed because JITs were faster, so as soon as devices had enough RAM/Flash/CPU to JIT they stopped using Jazelle.

brazzy 13y ago

No - the world is dominated by stuff that works and solves real problems. It doesn't care for how much smarter than all those mediocre idiots you think you are. It offers lots of opportunities for very smart people who mistake their mental masturbation for unstoppable genius to be very, very stupid.

dschiptsov 13y ago
Symbolics stuff not just worked, it worked remarkably well on the very modest hardware and solved real word problems. For an example of unimaginable by "modern standards" quality, go ahead and take a look at the Common Lisp documentation produced by Symbolics (the art of writing, "motorcycle maintenance" kind of clarity and conscience) which is buried somewhere inside bitsavers and take a look at the sources of Open Genera 2.0, the whole OS, which was available of dynamic modification and extension by the programmer, which could be found in a torrent search, and then go to the rosettacode website and look at every single page too see what a fucking crap is the language you are using to get shit done in exchange for a paycheck. It is worst in any possible way - verbosity, clumsiness, clutter, cryptic syntax, you name it. This is actually not interesting notion. Everyone with a bit of brains could visit rosettacode. The interesting questions are why it is so that the world is dominated by Java. Pages and pages were written about what's wrong with Java and why it is so popular. One sentence summary could go like this "a sandbox for crowds of packers to get shit done, agressively marketed to them via "you don't have to understand" memes by corporations to make big money". It spread like a virus due to bandwagon and peer effects and catchy memes like "write once" or "millions of man hours". Ok, use it, enjoy yourself, but, please, do not touch so rare and really wonderful things which you unable to comprehend.
- brazzy 13y ago
  Yeah, I guess you'll keep telling yourself that because it makes you happy and remain unable to comprehend just how wrong you are...
  - dschiptsov 13y ago
    Why, yes, reading Symbolics CL docs or David Moon's "language for oldtimers" makes me happy, like any other decent reading.
  - ithkuil 13y ago
    Neither you nor OP are wrong. It's possible, and common, to have practical tools that suck hard. It's also true that the more people use a tool (and for longer time), the more ways it will be found to suck (and Lisp has been around for quite a while (and used by quite a few people too (probably used by less people than Java) and (indeed) it managed to spawn quite a few heated reactions (to it's salient characteristics)))

nnq 13y ago

The world is dominated by: 1. mediocre people 2. smart people with very little knowledge of their own limits and a very strong tendency towards intellectual masturbation and asocial behavior ...this is why languages that offer a few obvious way to to do each thing and are boring enough to make people concentrate on "getting their jobs done" instead of doing limitless intellectual exploration win. (For example, this is why a enjoy coding in Python so much: the language is so limited and boring that it actually forces me to concentrate on the interesting aspects of the problem itself instead of the interesting aspects of the details of solving it :) ) (...now, why didn't Lisp win at least in the academic environment, where it was obviously one of the right tools for limitless exploration (together with the ML languages) is beyond me. Things like Mathematica and Matlab should have been Lisp based (and then Lisp itself evolved to suit their needs, maybe even a few syntaxes added on top), open-source and massively publicly funded from the get go. But putting public academic money in the right places is even harder than convincing CS academics that tools, infrastructure, platforms and languages are not boring and unworthy of attention but crucial, and that the wrong choices made by academics on these topics doomed us all. And no, just refusing to make a choice and choosing "what works best in the industry" (the "we'll teach our OOP introductory course using C++ because this is what they use in the industry nowadays" thinking) is not a solution. You must make a choice for yourself and only for yourself and make it right! And CS researchers should realize that languages and tools are not just "technical details", they are the vehicles for their ideas and "the vessel shapes the content", so just choosing the strongest vessel (language/platform) to implement your idea disregarding how much it deforms it (like a researcher choosing C# instead of a Lisp language to first implement a new programming idea) in not ok!)

arethuza 13y ago

I think that's a bit harsh - I actually moved from mostly doing Common Lisp development (on DEC Alpha workstations) to Java development in early '95 and I really liked Java back then - I was as passionate about it as people are today about Go/CoffeeScript/Haskell. Java, at least at the start, really was something fresh and good. Sure it became a horrible bloated mess - but isn't that the doom that faces all succesful software eventually?

zeckalpha 13y ago
That's why "Haskell avoids success at all costs".
- bayesianhorse 13y ago
  And it seems to be very good at this!
  - eru 13y ago
    Not good enough. I use it at a bank.
pjmlp 13y ago
Same here, I remember how fresh it felt by bringing GC to the masses and providing a more consistent experience across platforms than C or C++ were capable of, with their compiler specific behaviours, extensions and catching up with the ongoing standardization efforts.
- SixSigma 13y ago
  Sorry but it was Visual Basic that brought GC to the masses.

nabla9 13y ago

"We were not out to win over the Lisp programmers; we were after the C++ programmers. We managed to drag a lot of them about halfway to Lisp." - Guy Steele, Java spec co-author